The HP S700 And S700 Pro SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on September 7, 2017 9:00 AM ESTPower Management
Real-world client storage workloads leave SSDs idle most of the time, so the active power measurements presented earlier in this review only account for a small part of what determines a drive's suitability for battery-powered use. Especially under light use, the power efficiency of a SSD is determined mostly be how well it can save power when idle.
SATA SSDs are tested with SATA link power management disabled to measure their active idle power draw, and with it enabled for the deeper idle power consumption score and the idle wake-up latency test. Our testbed, like any ordinary desktop system, cannot trigger the deepest DevSleep idle state.
Idle power management for NVMe SSDs is far more complicated than for SATA SSDs. NVMe SSDs can support several different idle power states, and through the Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) feature the operating system can set a drive's policy for when to drop down to a lower power state. There is typically a tradeoff in that lower-power states take longer to enter and wake up from, so the choice about what power states to use may differ for desktop and notebooks.
Active idle is representative of a typical desktop, where none of the advanced PCIe or SATA link or NVMe power saving features are enabled and the drive is immediately ready to process new commands. The idle power consumption metric is measured with PCIe Active State Power Management L1.2 state and SATA Device-Initiated Power Management enabled and NVMe APST enabled.
Drive capacity has little effect on idle power consumption. Active idle power draw comes down mostly to the choice of controller. The Phison S10 is the best, followed by Samsung's SSDs and then the HP S700 with the SM2258XT. The S700 Pro with its DRAM more than 100mW extra at idle.
With link power management enabled, the S700 Pro has good power savings but doesn't stand out from the crowd. The S700 apparently fails to engage the slumber power state and thus power doesn't go down at all. This makes the S700 a poor choice for mobile use, but this may simply be a firmware bug that could be fixed.
The idle wake-up latency of the S700 is minimal, since it never actually enters a low-power state. The Phison S10 drives are by far the fastest to wake up from the slumber state, and the S700 Pro falls in the second tier of drives that wake up in less than 1ms.
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sonny73n - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
You should compare the 850 EVO with the BX300. I don't care whether the EVO has better controller but I will take a 2-bit per cell NAND over a 3-bit any day.mapesdhs - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
I just keep picking up lightly used 840 Pro 256GB units, people have forgotten how good they were and still are. It's annoying they no longer appear in review charts. Even the Vertex4 and Vector are still good compared to modern models.barleyguy - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
You seem to be comparing retail price to street price. HP has sales almost constantly. These might be $116 initially, but they'll be discounted very quickly to lower prices. I fully expect them to be competitive pricewise.r3loaded - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
Hurray, yet another 2017 SSD that gets utterly curbstomped by a Samsung SSD from 2015 on both performance and price.8steve8 - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
1. Who is buying SATA SSDs in 20172. Why is Anandtech putting so much effort into SATA SSDs in 2017
Billy Tallis - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
I've yet to hear from a vendor that their volume of NVMe drives has even come close to matching their volume of SATA drives, for either the retail consumer market or the client OEM market. Even in the enterprise market, NVMe isn't close to killing off SATA and SAS yet.We have new technologies launching in SATA products like the Intel 545s and Western Digital's 3D NAND SSDs. SATA SSDs are still more cost effective than NVMe SSDs, and will be until there have been plenty of low-end NVMe controllers like Phison E8 and Silicon Motion SM2263 on the market for quite a while.
Elstar - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
Also:1) most motherboards are still loaded with SATA connectors
2) most motherboards have few if any NVMe connectors (other than traditional PCIe)
3) SATA drives are often more friendly to "sneaker net" security.
8steve8 - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
yes, most motherboards have lots of SATA, but they also have a PCIe m.2 slot... hard to find one that doesn't.but who's buying SATA SSDs? It's an honest question.
on newegg i see a $99 240GB m.2 NVMe SSD, so who would recommend this 256GB SATA drive with a retail price of $169?
bji - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
Nice straw man. Answer: nobody would buy either. They'd buy a $90 250GB Samsung EVO. I just did last night.cfenton - Monday, September 11, 2017 - link
Lot's of people don't have motherboards that support m.2. You're right that most new motherboards support m.2, but there are a whole lot of people out there with 2+ year old computers who might want more storage or a faster boot drive. SSDs, of any kind, still aren't common in many OEM products, especially at the low end. A SATA SSD is still going to beat the hell out of any HDD.